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Whittle: The Jet Pioneer

Shelter Island, 77 minutes plus extras, 2012, $24.98.

In many ways this is the best and most comprehensive account of the turbojet aircraft engine’s development and the race with Germany to put the first jet warplanes in the air. Most of the narration is by Sir Frank Whittle himself, who appears frequently throughout the video, backed by plenty of riveting wartime color archival footage. Hans von Ohain and Ernst Heinkel, who were working on their own design, also appear in exclusive interviews, as do Whittle’s son, a retired Boeing 747 captain who often flew as a passenger with his father, and legendary test pilot Captain Eric Brown.

As the video makes clear, if Whittle had received government support and funding for his lone trailblazing work in the early 1930s, instead of meeting indifference and obstruction, Britain might have had squadrons of jet aircraft operational at the start of World War II. A surprising omission: von Ohain’s assertion that, had that been the case, Hitler would never have begun the war. What seems more probable is that the Führer would never have contemplated invading Britain, and if European skies had been full of British jet fighters and bombers later in the war, it could have hastened the conflict’s end by several months.

Whittle relates all this without bitterness, even when he recalls the government’s order that he stop development of the afterburner and fan (bypass) jet—both his inventions— and the cancellation of the Miles M.52. Equipped with his afterburner, that design might have achieved supersonic flight two years before Chuck Yeager and the Bell X-1.

The DVD includes many unique scenes, including footage of Whittle in the Allies’ first jet fighter, the Gloster Meteor, which he flew in 1945. He also appears as himself in a re-creation of the historic start-up of the W1, the world’s first aircraft turbojet, which went out of control and threatened to explode. When his colleagues ran for their lives, the designer stayed put—not, as he modestly remarks, because he was particularly brave, but more because he found himself rooted to the spot. The engineer in him wanted to know what had gone wrong.

One minor quibble: While the narration describes Whittle’s time at the Royal Air Force College, Cranwell, in the 1920s, where he wrote his thesis on jet propulsion, footage inexplicably shows the college’s airfield populated by jet aircraft that wouldn’t appear for another couple of decades. Overall, though, Whittle is a fascinating addition to every aviation enthusiast’s video library.

 

Originally published in the May 2013 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.